Hello friends and family,
So I'm back home. Have been since Friday. Australia was a successful trip. I now have people there whoa re going to help me out with Working Visas and money for my return to Oz next year which is amaaaaazing. I've also met some friends for life, something I had originally thought ended when you hit your mid twenties. Turns out. Not true.
Getting back to Toronto to see the family and walk down to the beach was much needed. I suddenly feel that the importance of keeping the house that I grew up in within the family has increased, and I have a new found determination to work as hard as I can in order to make sure it doesn't have to be sold in order for my parents to properly retire.
How fucked is that though? That we live in a system that requires most people to sell their home in order to live comfortably throughout the end of their lives.
People should be able to live in a house their whole lives AND pass it on to their family without so much difficulty. Homes should not be seen as commodities, but as the foundation of a family and a community that surrounds it.
I remember Mrs. Adams, who used to live next door to us when I was little. We would go over to her place and she would give us butterscotch candies. There are many other reasons to like this woman aside from her candy supply, trust me, she was an angel. So after thirty years of living in the same house with her husband, until he dies a few years before, what does her community do for her? They allow something called property value assessment to shove her out of her own house.
Property value assessment came in in Ontario under the neo-conservative Mike Harris government and it is a long shit-stain on the underwear of Ontario. Basically it assesses your home as to it's perceived value, not the frontage (amount of actual water pipe and sidewalk the city had to build for you property). So the focus turns away from having a home as something to live in and turning it into something to sell.
When houses in the beach began to go up in value, Mrs. Adams' property taxes went through the roof because of what her house was perceived to be worth. She suddenly had to double or even triple her payments, because a bunch of people whose job it is to buy and sell homes determined that her house was 'worth' more. Of course they would...that's how they make their fucking money! By shoving old ladies out of houses, bravo (clap, clap, clap).
There is no way to interpret these types of policies as anything but inhumane and wrong. It is laws like these that destroy opportunity for the building of a community. By having generations of families living next to each other on the same street, they can forge strong relationships and be there for each other. The more people you know on your street, the less you need to worry about a babysitter. The less you need to worry about food, if you suddenly had a tough year. A lot of worries would go away because the isolated tribe of two (which is what we've become, we buy more redundant items that way... go capitalism!) would be increased to a more sustainable level.
Seeing as it doesn't seem like it's going to change anytime soon, I'm determined to make a bunch of these goddamn dollars so I can ensure a piece of our family history isn't lost. As shitty as it might be, it seems like I'm going to have to make money in order not to care about it. How does that make sense?!
Okay I ranted a bit there. Still with me? It's okay if you're not, I understand.
So I'm back in Toronto now. Will be here for three weeks. I'm headlining for the first time at the Yuk Yuk's in downtown Toronto. Then off to Montreal to headline The Comedy Nest. Not sure what I'm going to do for the last two weeks in July. Normally I archive shows for the Just for Laughs festival, but they canceled the entire archiving program this year. It's a sad day for international comedy. I used to tape 45 shows that took place, consisting of hundreds of acts from around the world at the top of their game. I've been doing the gig for five years now, and suddenly it's over. Man this blog entry is a downer. Okay on to happy things!
I'm heading to Scotland to perform in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for the first time ever. This is the world's largest festival of it's kind and I can't wait to get out there. Afterward I'll be staying in the UK until mid-November showcasing in clubs and cultivating as much work as possible so that I can return on a yearly basis.
Oh yeah. I just turned thirty on Monday. I hope this doesn't mean I can no longer be silly. I kind of need that.
